The Adicts – Live in Tel Aviv (4/10/14)

Tel Aviv may be a city of bikini bodies, all-year summer and an intensely clubby nightlife, but punks from every crevice of Israel crawled out to the city’s premier rock dive, Barby, on April 10th for the biggest punk show to hit this corner of the Middle East in years: The Adicts.

The English band started making noise back in 1975, known as much for their scrappy, Oi Oi style punk as their “A Clockwork Orange” obsession: all-white ‘droog’ outfits and front man Keith “Monkey” Warren’s white and black, perpetually grinning face paint. You could say these guys are still touring behind their last record, 2012’s “All the Young Droogs,” but the truth is The Adicts have been at it, nearly nonstop, for decades.

Without too many international punk shows to call our own in Tel Aviv, Barby was a veritable punk convention before the band marched onstage just before midnight to the foreboding score of the Kubrick classic. As if the crowd had been counting down the seconds to that very moment, the floor was an immediate flurry of flailing limbs as the band launched into its iconic “Joker in the Pack” and “This Is Your Life.”

But it wasn’t long before the crowd’s overexcitement became too much for The Adicts. Surely these lifers are used to crowd surfing, circle pits and the occasional stage diver, but one Israeli too many hit the stage — one of them crunching guitarist Pete Dee’s pedal rig under him.

Where a too-rowdy crowd might not have been a problem for The Adicts of, say, 1984, the same band three decades later was none too pleased.

“I don’t want to fucking play if you’re going to break my shit,” announced Dee. “Flying around the world to have your shit broken — it’s not cool.”

A stumble, but not a fall; minutes later, the band was bashing through classic shout-alongs “Chinese Takeaway,” “Smart Alex,” “Number” and the excellent new “Horrorshow.”

But with each real banger, the same few fans swarmed the stage, drawing Dee’s ire and stopping the show in its tracks. The crowd never seemed to mind — several times they spontaneously broke into a huge chorus of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the band’s best hug-it-out anthem.

So when The Adicts finally tore into the song in their encore, the raucous crowd knew it was the last chance to go crazy. The whole thing was over in 90 minutes, leaving a sweatier-than-usual Middle East crowd still begging for more. Should the fans have been better behaved? Maybe. But that wouldn’t have made for much of a punk show, now would it?